Law must be changed to provide better protection for journalists.

The Court of Appeal has ruled that the UK's anti-terrorism laws are incompatible with fundamental human rights because they "do not afford effective protection" for journalists, and those working with them. The ruling was made by the Court as it allowed David Miranda's appeal against the use of police powers to stop, detain, question and search him at Heathrow Airport in August 2013. At the time, he was helping his partner, Glenn Greenwald, who was publishing some of the first leaked documents provided by Edward Snowden. The latest judgment partially overturns an earlier ruling by the UK's High Court that the police action was legal.

Further Reading

As a press release from Miranda's lawyers, Bindmans, reports, the Appeal Court's senior judge and Master of the Rolls, Lord Dyson, said: "[i]f journalists and their sources can have no expectation of confidentiality, they may decide against providing information on sensitive matters of public interest." The Court made particular reference to Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides the right to "receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

Bindmans points out another important aspect of the judgement: "The Secretary of State had argued that the 2000 [Terrorism] Act definition of terrorism includes those involved in lawful political activity—such as journalists or protestors—if they accidentally and inadvertently do something that puts lives at risk. In overruling the Divisional Court, the Court of Appeal said that the Secretary of State was wrong and terrorism required some intention to cause a serious threat to public safety, such as endangering life." That's a significant narrowing of what can be classed as "terrorism."

On one point, the Court of Appeal did not agree with David Miranda. He had argued that when the police had detained him they had acted for a purpose that fell outside what the law allowed. However, the Court said that the powers granted to the police were so broad, that it was almost impossible to use them outside the present law: "they could be exercised for reasons that were in the mind of one of the officers in the command chain, even though that officer did not actually perform the stop, had no reasonable basis for those reasons, and had not communicated those reasons to any other officers who did carry out the stop."

So the Court's overall ruling is that the police acted within the law, but that the law itself is flawed and must now be changed to include judicial oversight before these powers are used against journalists.

Further Reading

The ruling means that the police will still be able to question and detain travellers at ports for up to nine hours, as they have done in thousands of cases heretofore. What they cannot do in the light of this ruling is seize material being used by a journalist, without seeking the prior judicial authorisation that would have been required outside an airport, and without any reasonable grounds to suspect that the person in question was involved in real terrorist activity.

Today's decision is an important victory for the freedom of the press in the UK, and vindicates Miranda's decision to appeal against the earlier High Court ruling. As he tweeted shortly after the decision was handed down: "My purpose was to show UK's terrorism law violates press freedoms. And journalism isn't 'terrorism.' We won!"